There has recently been introduced to the market by the assignee of this application, a new marker sleeve construction comprising an assembly of marker sleeves formed by a base film and one or more top films seamed together transversely and having longitudinal and transverse separation line means. An individual tubular sleeve marker can be removed from the assembly along separable line means for application to an object. An assembly of tubular sleeve markers of this type is fully illustrated and described in U.S. Pat. No. 4,361,230, "Assembly of Tubular Sleeve Markers" to Downing et al, and another assembly of this type is illustrated in U.S. Pat. No. 4,363,401, "Sleeve Marker Assembly" to Savagian, both assigned to the assignee of this application. These new types of sleeve marker assemblies offer significant advantages to the users, and are rapidly gaining market recognition.
A flexible web of marker sleeves such as described above can be easily manipulated by hand for manual detachment of a marker sleeve from the assembly for application to an object as an indentification device. However, there are a number of users who must identify a large number of objects and therefore have need of a machine for application of the subject marker sleeves, which will also facilitate high speed application of the sleeves. No suitable machine is available to our knowledge, and we have therefore developed the marker sleeve applicator machine of the present invention to satisfy this need.